Often, it may be desirable for the calculations in a spreadsheet to be protected such that, for example, the calculations are accessible or viewable by only certain users. For example, for corporate compliance reasons, an organization may wish to know who updated a spreadsheet, what they did, and when they did it. Thus, such an organization may want the spreadsheet to be part of its “document management solution” so that the organization can control access to it.
A customer may want to allow the reuse of a portion of a spreadsheet, i.e., to share the calculation and results from that portion of the spreadsheet only, and not the entire spreadsheet. This is more than just viewing, as it actually exposes the data and calculations. This would enable another spreadsheet author to copy, or reuse, the results in their own spreadsheet. Currently, customers need to allow access to an entire spreadsheet to do this, which may not be desirable from a management and control perspective.
A customer may want to allow multiple users to edit a single spreadsheet. Some of the users may be offline when they edit, and some may be online. Such users may wish to be able to edit their portion of the spreadsheet, regardless of who else may be editing the file at that time. Currently, users are forced to take turns collaborating on a spreadsheet because, in most document management systems, only a single person can “check out” a file and edit it. Other users must wait until it is “checked in” to edit it.
And, even though it may be desirable to tightly manage a spreadsheet, it may also be desirable for the results from it to be viewed widely across an organization. For example, an organization may wish to allow certain employees to see a chart or table from a spreadsheet, but not to allow them to edit the spreadsheet, or even open it to see the calculations that were used to generate those views of the data. Though this is currently possible in some systems, it is possible only at the file level. There is no notion of allowing different users access to different parts of the same workbook.
Another thing that customers often do is to create a “dashboard.” A dashboard may be defined as a page where many objects (e.g., charts, tables, graphs, etc.) are assembled together to visually and holistically indicate the status of a project, business, or other organization. Currently, users need to open a spreadsheet and hand pick all the items that they want to assemble into a dashboard. This can be a tedious and sometimes, e.g., for large spreadsheets, difficult task.